Earlier this week week, Silva’s manager Ed Soares, who sold off his Sinister clothing line to Silverstar, TapouT and Hitman clothing ownership group Authentic Brands Group last year, announced that his client has also signed lucrative deals with both Nike and the Sport Club Corinthians Paulista soccer team.

“The Spider’s” fight shorts and walkout wear will be made by Nike and he will don a Corinthians jersey for his UFC 134 bout with Yushin Okami later this month. The club will also name their new stadium after the dominant 36-year-old Brazilian fighter.

In an attempt to broaden their fanbase, Affliction is shelling out the dough to appeal to a normally untapped potential audience: Nascar-lovers. Mike Skinner’s car is turning into a moving billboard for the clothier-turned-promoter at the Pepsi 500 this weekend in San Bernardino, Ca.

Looking at the artist’s rendition of the car above (courtesy of Yahoo’s Steve Cofield), I’m totally pumped to see some skulls go screaming down the track. So pumped, in fact, that I may even watch Nascar (no I won’t).

What’s interesting here is that this whole stock car ad campaign makes a few assumptions that may or may not be valid. One is that there are enough Nascar fans who know enough about MMA already to even recognize what this is an ad for. You have to either know what Affliction is, or know who Arlovski and/or Barnett are for this to even make sense. The “vs.” gives it away that there’s probably a fight going on, but aside from that all you’ve got is a date and some skulls. Maybe the thinking is that if a date and skulls aren’t enough for you, then Affliction doesn’t want your money anyway (yes they do).

Just out of curiosity, any Nascar fans out there? As in, for real? I gotta be honest, this is as close as I ever came. And, to a lesser extent, this.

The first time I ever got drunk it was thanks to Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor. At the time I was fifteen and didn’t know that the phrase “Fine Malt Liquor” made no sense at all. Some friends and I got the big mouth bottles and drank them as fast as we could in the vacant lot behind the supermarket. Needless to say, we soon threw up and had horrible headaches, but the point was we did it. The fact that it was awful only made us feel more like men, which of course we weren’t. It wasn’t until a few months later when I saw a homeless man drinking a forty of Mickey’s in the street while holding his pants up with his free hand that I realized maybe we had been using the wrong metric by which to gauge our manhood.

Mickey’s lost me as a customer back then, but that doesn’t mean they’re giving up. They’ve apparently decided to go the Coors Light route, and instead of investing money into coming up with a better product they’re simply going to do weird stuff to the container. The newest weird thing: putting Tito Ortiz on their limited edition cans.

There’s something that’s just too perfect about seeing Ortiz hook up with Mickey’s. They were both once beloved by the UFC until the organization found something better, and they’re both responsible for regrettable pregnancies. Too far?